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this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2025
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There's this documentary that follows a guy who intends to take steroids for his amateur biking competition. He wants to show how easy it would be to test negative while taking PEDs. He needs to find someone who will test his urine and he gets in contact of Russia's anti-doping program director right before their whole program exposes its dope-injected ass in front of the world.
It paints Russia as this very negative, lying, corrupt place with this profoundly illegal and deeply ingrained PED abuse scandal.
Why would some sports scandal have any impact on your perspective in regards to an international armed conflict?
I guess in my mind it was something like "If they're all lying through their teeth about doping in sports, I wonder how much of what Putin was saying about the context for the protection of the Donbas region was hot air and bullshit."
But again, my source is a documentary about sports? I didn't even make it through Putin's speech. I don't know.
The context for the Donbas existed long before Putin ever mentioned it. If anything, Putin did more deflection after they got Crimea and said that the Donbas regions didn't want to defect despite the fact that the Donbas regions were very very interested in going the way of Crimea.
The lie is more that Putin wanted to go to war and is very interested in a conflict with the West. This is clearly not the case, if Putin had wanted war with Ukraine he would have pushed for it immediately after Crimea and taken the Donbas regions while the Ukrianian government was in the middle of a coup and disorganized. The fact is that Ukrianian Nazis and Nazism had been developing under Putin's nose the entire time and he did nothing, it was only when the Russian military convinced him that not only was an attack on the Donbas imminent, that it could continue to roll into Russian territory if it succeeded, and that they could counter it with minimal force and expense that Putin ok'd the war, which is how this whole mess is now bogged down.
But idk what you would expect from a nation who literally threw away their reason for existing, sold themselves to the highest bidder, and when that didn't get them universal acceptance into the international capitalist cult, which is something that any amateur Marxist scholar could have told them would happen, try to make up another reason for having rejected the ideology that made their nation relevant on the international stage. At this point my only prognosis is that Russia is a cursed land and Russians a cursed people, to emulate Western lies and practices but not understand that you have to actually be stupid enough to believe the lie you are telling for it to work effectively.
I feel my perspective broadening as I read this. Treadonme thank you for your incredibly insightful comments on how Russia thinks and benefits from the violence it undertakes. It's of course more complicated than America makes it seem.
i have vague recollection of pre-intervention polling and it was like half
Yeah, as Russia didn't intervene, there were a lot of people who thought they should try to stay as independent oblasts, and not connect themselves up with Russia. Pre-intervention the civil war was still occuring though.
Putin pretending concern about Russians in donbas is as troll as the US pretending concern about Uyghur in China. Geopolitics in capitalist countries aren't based on morality, they're based on interests and power struggles. Russia is slowly losing control over its sphere of influence of the past 35 years because it can't compete economically with the EU/US or in soft power with the US. NATO has kept pushing eastwards and funding/organising colour revolutions in countries with deep economic and political ties with Russia. Russia sees that the only way it has to maintain a certain degree of control over what it considers its sphere of influence is through military power, so it does this.
I'm not judging whether or not there are legitimate concerns for ethnically Russian people in Donbas, I'm stating that this is irrelevant for the Russian government in terms of geopolitics, and at best it serves it as an excuse to justify the invasion to its population. I'm not judging either whether Russia is imperialist or anti-imperialist in its current war against a proxy army of the west.
This has been my observation as well. This is inter-capitalist conflict and it's going to be dominated by what benefits the capitalists on either side at the end of the day more than whatever stated objectives are.
In Rosa Luxemburg's Russian Revolution, her criticism of the Soviets going along with national projects in the first place was particularly prescient:
spoiler
See, and this is where you can have an actually constructive criticism of Stalin, as he was a big believer in pushing the national sovereignty of ethnic peoples because he was an ethnic Georgian, despite no one fighting longer or harder against forces of reaction. It was a blind spot in his theory that was created by his own personal experience under Russian chauvinism, but it was also supported by Lenin's theories of political maneuvering and it was these kinds of ideas that bound him closer to Stalin than Trotsky, who was much more inclined towards Luxembourg's ideas.
But it does lead us to ask, if the Bolsheviks didn't give up their claim to inherit the Russian empire, would Rosa have just decried them as another imperialist? I only say this because much of her theories appear to simply be monday morning quarterbacking to Bolshevik ideas that actually got to be implemented, after all, today we could just as easily point towards the Balkans as a proof that not giving people their own national identities eventually leads to another kind of destruction and reactionary uprising, where the proletariat are easily pitted against each other by the ethnic bourgeois under 'freedom from communist tyranny'. I think the national/ethnic question is an incredibly difficult question to answer, and it will take more than simply pitting 20th century revolutionaries against each other.
Sorry in advance for the wall of text:
100%, it's not about declaring one or the other as "correct" but understanding their positions within the broader context. What I see as a goal of criticism like this is to allow for us to understand past failures and their impact on the present as well as how to move forward, rather than trying to lionize any particular figure. They are all flawed, but still worth learning from.
Based on the nature of her critique I don't think that she would simply have changed her tune given different circumstances, if anything I think she was hoping that those national liberation slogans were just that, slogans to rally support then set aside, rather than integrated into the socialist project once the Bolsheviks won. I do want to reiterate that she was clearly in support of the Bolsheviks, despite having criticisms for them, she had far worse things to say about social democrats and reformers:
She had criticism for the Bolsheviks from the standpoint of what she saw as the needs of the world revolution, but her primary criticism was of the failure on the part of the proletariat of Western Europe to aid them.
On the subject of the Bolsheviks signing Brest-Litovsk, which was the basis for the criticism I cited in the previous post she had this to say about the choice from a non theoretical standpoint:
At the end of the day and with the benefit of hindsight the Bolsheviks did make the best of a bad situation and while it's possible to envision a better path it doesn't mean that it was going to be viable in the historical context.
This was contemporaneous criticism though, her polemics with Lenin happened before any of this unfolded.
While Lenin and the Bolshevik line was centralization, the national projects were ultimately in opposition to that.
Quoting Lenin now on this:
My read of this is that both parties have their own perspective in this situation, Rosa with her perspective with Polish bourgeois nationalists, Lenin with the understanding of what reactionary russian nationalism could lead to un-checked. Not to be a centrist but they both have valid points.
As Lenin called her an opportunist, she said the same, the slogans of national liberation was commented on as opportunism and a concession to bourgeois and petty-bourgeois classes that would ultimately be a poison pill to the entire project, this is from 1915, well before these events played out:
That still happened in the context of an imperialist world system. Once the USSR fell their days were numbered. I would still take the lesson from that to be that as long as capitalist states exist, the system operates on that logic and no other states can have self determination. Socialist states will be besieged by counterevolution and reaction, nationalist states will be limited by their own colonial conquests and ability to enslave others.
These are great insights! Thanks!